Prof. Scott B. NoegelChair, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and CivilizationUniversity of Washington

Book note:Fernandez, Miquel Perez. An Introductory Grammar of Rabbinic Hebrew.Transl.John Elwolde. Leiden: E.J. Bril11997.

First Published in:Religious Studies Review 24 (1998), 433.

JJudaism:

Hellenistic throughLate AntiquitY \

AN INTRODUCTORY GRAMMAR OFRABBINIC HEBREW. By Miguel Perez Fer-nandez. Translated by John Elwolde. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997.pp. xxii + 327.$112.50;ISBN 90-04-1O8~.

This excellent teaching grammar is designedfor students with a working knowledgeof bibli-cal Hebrew. Not only is it the fust work to appearin English on the subject since M. H. Segars1927 grammer (reprinted in 1979), but, unlikeSegal's reference grammar, which is based pri-marily on printed editions, this teaching gram-mar is based on the manuscriptwork undenakcnin the past two generations by M.S. Zuckerman-del, S. Lieberman, E. Y. Kutscher,J. S. Lauter-bach, I. H. Weiss, and manyothers. It is a mostwelcome work. The book is organized into fourparts: nouns, verbs, particles, and clauses. Eachof these sections is subdivided further into sixunits including an introductory text,discussionsof morphology, grammar and usage, phraseol-ogy. vocabulaJ)', and a series of exercises. Theintroduction to the work offers a useful discus-sion of the various strata of Rabbinic Hebrew(e.g., Tannaitic and Amoraic)and their relation-ship to the Hebrew of the Bible and the scrollsfound at Qumran. Also toucheduponare thecur-rent state of research on RabbinicHebrew,a dis-cussion of Rabbinic Hebrewin the lightof recentadvances in dialect geography,and an overviewof the evidence for influences from Aramaic.Greek. Latin, Akkadian, and Persian.

Scott B. Noege/University a/WashingtonSeattle. WA98195 0